Angels of Darkness (25 page)

A shadow passed over her face. She seemed small all of a sudden.

“We were in the car, going to pick up Emily from the sitter's. We were fighting about his generosity in regard to my ‘parental rights.' ” Her voice dripped with bitterness. “He wanted to leave and stay gone. I insisted that Emily needed a father and he couldn't just take off. He was mad. He told me that everyone had a right to be happy. He wanted to be free of me and Emily but he didn't want to be judged for it. And then, all of a sudden, he lost consciousness. It was like someone had flipped a switch. We shot into the opposing lane. I remember headlights. I woke up in the hospital.”

She fell silent. “He had a stroke,” Karina said finally in a flat voice. “He had fibromuscular dysplasia. Nobody knew. He was healthy as a horse, played racquetball, and then he just died. It was touch and go for me for a little while but I bounced back. I was in the hospital for two weeks. Emily had to stay with his parents. They didn't feed her.”

“What?”

“Brian, Jonathan's father, always eats out. When Jonathan died, he spent all his time at a country club. He said it was his way to cope. Lynda is in her seventies. She has a touch of dementia. All she did was eat candy all day, but she wouldn't give Emily any—it would ruin her teeth. She would forget to give Emily lunch, and when she did remember to feed her, she would either try to cook and burn it or she'd give Emily food that had been in the fridge for so long, it wasn't just moldy, it was blooming.”

She was crying, not from pity but from anger. There were no tears, but he heard it in Karina's voice, hidden behind the flat tone.

“They had a bowl of nuts set out and Emily told me she would pretend to fall asleep and then sneak out and steal them. When I got out of the hospital, she was six pounds lighter. She barely weighs anything as it is. So now you know why she hoards food. She was terrified, her father had just died, her mother was in the hospital, and her own grandparents wouldn't feed her. I told Arthur she doesn't have anyone except me. I meant it. We are not welcome at that house. They blame me and Emily for Jonathan's stroke. We made his life so difficult, he died to escape.”

The red rosettes on her face were turning darker. Karina touched her hand to her forehead and looked at it. Her eyes widened. She rubbed his forearm.

“This is another reaction to the venom?”

“Mmhh-hhm,” Lucas said.

“I told you my story. Tell me yours now. It's fair.”

“What do you want to know?” he asked, wondering what she would think if she looked inside his mind and saw him strangling her husband.

“Who are you? All of you. Who are you really? I need to know what's happening to me.”

Lucas sighed.

 

 

S
he had told him too much, Karina decided. As much as she wanted for it to be a bribe, a down payment for the information he held, at least in part she told him what she did because he was lying beside her, bruised, beat up, bloody, and hurting. He needed a distraction and she had enough compassion to give him one. But she hadn't meant to pour her heart out. It just happened. He was in pain, and although she had the means to ease his suffering, he refused to feed, because he didn't want to hurt her. He wasn't willing to trade his pain for hers. The least she could do was talk and try to distract him.

Karina reached over and touched his hand. His fingers closed on hers. Lucas glanced at her, surprised. They had that in common now—both of them treated any act of kindness with suspicion. She didn't expect kindness anymore, except from him. But she was an outsider. He wasn't.

“There are no scared women here to watch us,” he told her.

“It was never for them. It was for you.”

She almost cried and couldn't even understand why. It was the stress, Karina told herself. The trauma of watching hundreds of people die at once. And the fever, which kept rising and rising. Her breath felt hot when she exhaled. Her skin was dry and too tight. And now there were rings of red dots all over her arms.

She had never told the entire story of her marriage to anyone.
It's the fever. Of course it is.

Lucas was looking at her. Sprawled like that, even battered, he looked enormous. If a week ago someone had told her she would be locked in a vault with a nude, bloody man who was trying his best not to devour her to stop his pain, she would've dialed 911 to report a lunatic running amok.

“I'm going to tell you a story,” Lucas said. His voice was laced with fatigue. “You can choose to believe it or not. It can be the truth or just a story. It's your choice.”

“Okay.”

Lucas closed his eyes. “Suppose there is a civilization. A powerful country. It has taken over all of its available territory, but it knows that it must expand. It must continue to grow outward, or it will rot and collapse. This civilization sends colonists out to explore new territories. They find fertile lands and colonize them. When they succeed, they let the knowledge of the large civilization fade. The small colonies grow and prosper on their own, and when they develop enough, they rediscover their mother civilization and rejuvenate it with their unique achievements.”

He glanced at her.

“Okay,” Karina said. “I can see how that would happen.”

“Suppose a new island was found for colonization. An island with an abundant ecosphere and great resources. The civilization had done this many times before and they had developed a protocol. The colony ships arrived and the colonists created thirteen small settlements, Houses, one for each colony ship.

“Genetically, all the colonists belonged to the Base Strain. It's a very stable breed of human, long-lived, resistant to diseases, armed with superior DNA repair mechanisms to counteract mutation. To successfully colonize a new environment, a species must adapt to it. To facilitate this adaptation, most of the colonists were exposed to an agent inhibiting their cellular and DNA repair and vulnerability to native viruses.”

“They deliberately made their people weaker? How does that make sense?”

“They didn't just want a colony,” Lucas said. “They wanted a unique colony, perfectly in tune with this new island. That's how the civilization kept itself from stagnation. The colonists wanted an explosion of mutations in the future generations, and they needed a shorter life span and faster sexual maturity to pass the new changes on to their offspring. That's why scientists experiment on mice: they breed quickly and don't live very long. The shorter life span goes hand in hand with faster sexual maturity. But it also brings negative anthropological consequences: immaturity, inability to pass on knowledge, loss of ethics and culture, and so on. These consequences were considered acceptable. The colony had to develop on its own without the knowledge of its origin anyway. The sooner people forgot where they came from, the better. A small group of the colonists remained as Base Strain for control purposes. They lived in the settlements, the Houses, and monitored the whole thing. With me?”

Sort of. “Go on.”

“Mutations bloomed. A succession of several dozen subspecies of human followed. Some subspecies developed variations, people with similar powers or physiology. Subspecies 29 showed all of the adaptations necessary for survival, but all eight of its types were plagued by sensitivity to heat and alarmingly low fertility. Subspecies 44, type 3, produced exceptional Mind Benders, who were prone to insanity.”

“Is that what Henry is?”

Lucas nodded.

“We're not talking about islands, are we?”

“Some say islands,” Lucas said. “Some say planets. It's just a story.”

A story, right. “Aliens.” She stared at him. “Are you trying to tell me that all of us are aliens?”

Lucas sighed. “You could say that. You could also say that once the planet shaped us and twisted our DNA, we are now just as native as anybody else.”

“What about Subspecies 30?”
What about you?

Lucas's eyes fixed on her. “Subspecies 30, types 1 through 5, otherwise known as Demons. A venomous, carnivorous, predatory variant of human with the ability to drastically alter its morphology. They were powerful, aggressive, territorial, and they dominated their point of origin for a few hundred years, hunting in small packs, but this subspecies was not viable long term. They were crippled because their bodies couldn't produce a set of small molecules necessary for their survival, so they had to cannibalize other humans to get it.”

“Cannibalize?”

“At that point the various subspecies of human had only a rudimentary language and no memory of where they came from,” Lucas said. “No ethics, no morals, nothing. They were forming fledgling societies and ‘might is right' was the law. If I need your blood, and there is nothing in my upbringing or experience that tells me I shouldn't, why wouldn't I kill you and eat your flesh? Being a nice guy is a modern concept.”

He was serious. He was actually serious.

“Should I keep going?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“This went on for hundreds of years. The small remaining pockets of Base Strain, the original colonists, kept as a control group, meticulously documented all of it from their Houses. They didn't interfere. They just cataloged what occurred.

“Then suddenly Subspecies 48 popped on the scene. The Rippers had a fatal vulnerability to cancers but also the ability to rupture holes in reality, accessing dimensional fragments. This was a new development, unknown to the colonists, and nobody knew what to do about it. Some Houses took Ripper children and raised them within the settlements to study them.

“The mutations bloomed and bloomed, until one subspecies emerged as best adapted. It did well in almost every climate. It reproduced quickly, showed mental agility, and demonstrated decent DNA repair. At approximately six thousand planetary cycles, Subspecies 61 was declared viable. The colonists had done their job: they had created the type of human with the best ability to survive and prosper. Now nature needed to take over. All support for other strains ceased, as dictated by the Original Mandate.
Ile
must survive. Subspecies 61 became
ile
. Everyone else needed to die to make room.”

“Subspecies 61. Humans,” Karina guessed. “Us.”

“No,” Lucas said. “Them. Your neighbors, your friends. But not you.”

Her fever was now so high, she was freezing and melting at the same time. “You said them, not me. What do you mean, not me?”

“I'm getting to that. Other subspecies were dying out, while Subspecies 61 went on to multiply and claim the island.”

“The planet.” Karina didn't need him to keep babying her.

“The planet,” he agreed. “The colony cities began to gradually phase out their technology. They were letting themselves disappear. But there was a protocol breach at one of the cities, as a result of which Subspecies 29, the one that had trouble with heat, discovered where they came from.”

“What do you mean?”

Lucas sighed. “I mean that the scientists at the Mare House fucked up. Subspecies 29 produced several unusually smart children. A sudden explosion of kids with genius-level intelligence was rare and odd, so the idiots thought it would be a good idea to study them further. They extracted these children and raised them within Mare with the full knowledge of their history. Well, the kids grew up and decided they didn't want to go gently into that good night while some other breed of human took over.

“There was a quiet coup. By the time it was discovered, Strain 29 and their captive personnel had genetically corrected their shortcomings. Now they had no trouble with heat and they bred like rabbits. They decided that they were more viable than Strain 61. They, not humans, were
ile.
A mistake was made and they decided it had to be corrected. They were ordained to take over the Earth.”

Now it made sense. “They became the Ordinators?”

“Yes.”

“So this is it? They've been trying to kill us off for thousands of years?”

“More or less. They went to war, using the colonists' original technology. The other cities opposed them, but they were weak by that point and in the process of dissolving themselves, so they plucked people from different strains with combat potential. The Ordinators were broken and would've been wiped out, except they acquired Rippers and began hopping through dimensional fragments. Eventually, so did we.

“Strain 61, the
ile
humans, was reproducing too quickly, and their numbers grew too numerous. They saw us and started forming religions and folklore. We had to disappear.”

“So this is how it is,” Karina said.

He nodded. “People like me have been keeping the Ordinators at bay for over thirty thousand years. Occasionally they break through with a new weapon. Sometimes it's a virus that kills the food supply. Sometimes it's bubonic plague. Sometimes they find a way to fiddle with the climate. The problem is that the Ordinators breed faster than us, they're better organized, and their job is easier: it's much simpler to destroy something than to protect it.

“There were thirteen Houses, one for each landing site. They have one House, the House of Mare. There are probably between one and two hundred thousand of them. We are the soldiers of the remaining twelve Houses. There are maybe fifty thousand of us. We crossbreed and have children with weird powers instead of dying out the way we should. This is the planet where everything went wrong. As humanity moves closer and closer to interstellar space flight, the Ordinators are getting desperate, because once we reconnect with the root civilization, it's all over for them. They abandoned the original mandate and they will be exterminated. They're attacking with everything they've got and we're losing the fight.”